People's Mujahedin of Iran

The People's Mujahideen of Iran (Farsi: Mujahedin-e-Khalq, MEK) is an opposition group in Iran founded on 5 September 1965 as a Marxist political movement. Later, its goal became to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they carried out several terrorist attacks against the Iranian government to assist Iraq.

History
On 5 September 1965, the Mujahedin-el-Khalq (MEK) was founded in the Kingdom of Iran by Mohammad Hanifnejad, who sought to advocate a Marxist Communist revolution against the corrupt Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The MEK's goals changed in 1979 in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution against the westernization of Iran, led by Imam and Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, with the MEK now seeking to oust the new Islamist theocratic government. The MEK allied with Iraq (a socialist-ruled state under the dictator Saddam Hussein) and the MEK began an insurgency in cooperation with Iraqi Army forces at the same time as the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. The MEK's struggle included the bombing of the Iranian parliament, which killed their president Mohammad-Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar in an infamous bomb attack.

The MEK later succeeded in assassinating the Iranian general Ali Sayad Shirazi in 1999, killing him as he left his house in Iran. The MEK were designated as a terrorist organization by Iraq, Iran, the European Union, United States, and Canada, but the latter three unclassified the MEK in 2012 after a seven-year political struggle that did not involve terrorism.